Research and commercial software offer a myriad of tools for novices, photographers and other professionals to perfect regions of skin in a photograph (i.e., photo). For example, skin retouching is routinely applied in the fashion and photography industries. However, existing professional tools require sophisticated editing steps.
For example, professional photographers tend to use a combination of manual operations in photo editing applications such as ADOBE PHOTOSHOP® for skin retouching. These operations can include performing frequency separation, using clone tools, patch tools and the like, and then manually applying different parameters to different frequency layers. There are many instructional videos that teach users how to perform such manual skin retouching. Careful and precise manual retouching can lead to realistic results. However, it often takes a professional user 5-10 minutes of manual effort to achieve such results for a given photo, depending on skin quality in the original photo. Such a process is tedious and time consuming, resulting in an unsatisfactory process. Moreover, manual retouching is often beyond the skill level of most casual users.